Tag Archives: trade unions

Protesters poured into the streets of Budapest by the thousands the past few nights with calls for Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to “reconsider it!” The policy to be reconsidered is what Hungary’s workers are calling the government’s new “slave law” requiring labor to work up to 400 mandatory hours of overtime (think: every Saturday all year at 8 hours a day), with the “promise” of pay 3 years later. Meanwhile, recent weeks saw protestors in Wisconsin marching to their capitol demanding the outgoing Republican Governor, Scott Walker (“butler” to the “black energy” oil and coal baron Koch Brothers), halt plans to restrict the powers of the new incoming Democratic governor. Changes to giveaways to big business through the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, among other measures, would be foreclosed, ensuring that public gravy keeps getting ladled out to business interests favored by the Republicans.

160,000 South Korean workers walked off the job last month to protest President Moon Jae-in’s labor policy.

The following is an interview with Wolsan Liem of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union (KPTU) about the strike, the current government’s labor policy, and the state of South Korea’s economy.

Genocide is happening in Colombia. There is no other way to put it. In just one terrible day, July 16, 2018, six social movement leaders were killed. Since the June 17 election of Ivan Duque as Colombia’s president, social movement leaders have been killed at the rate of more than one a day. Duque is a disciple of former president and death squad patron Álvaro Uribe, whom he calls Colombia’s “eternal president”.

In a decision that has to the potential to gut public-sector unions, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled 5 to 4 that non-union-member public employees don’t have to pay “fair share” or “agency” fees to the unions that represent them in collective bargaining and, in many cases, grievances.

The Supreme Court will soon hand down a decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the exhaustively discussed challenge to laws requiring government workers who don’t join unions to cover the cost of services they benefit from, such as collective bargaining and arbitration.

Breaking news!

The U.S. Government is definitely set upon winning WW III, not avoiding WW III. Nuclear weapons are thus being built and deployed by the U.S. Government with the intention to conquer Russia, and this goal has become NATO’s mission, and its only remaining core function, though this fact is not publicly acknowledged.

While Western powers present Ukraine as a young democracy, Yuriy Lutsenko, prosecutor general of Ukraine makes shocking lawless statements. Opposition journalists call him for resign, but Lutsenko thinks everything is OK.

“There is now a clear and present danger of an imminent and great big famine engulfing Yemen: much bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives,” UN humanitarian chief tells.

Bolsonaro’s harsh neo-liberal policies will fail to restore growth to Brazil’s economy and will entail an all-out assault on living standards. Bolsonaro intends to rely on the police and the army to physically crush any resistance to the savage attacks on the population that he has in store should he win.